Mark Reviews Movies: 12 HOUR SHIFT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2020

One can sense writer/director Brea Grant trying to generate chaotic momentum in 12 Hour Shift, a pitch-black comedy about organ harvesting and some dangerously desperate, incompetent people. The screenplay stacks so many obstacles and complications against everyone and from every direction that we're never entirely certain from where or whom the next conflict will arise. It starts to feel a bit too random, as if Grant lost track of whatever grand plan she had in mind.

The idea of logic in comedy, especially an example as intentionally hectic as this (The climax becomes a door farce of sorts, with people suddenly entering, performing some gag, and, with their purpose served, immediately exiting), may seem counterintuitive, but here, we need some kind of stability for the humor to work. Everyone in this movie is either some degree of malevolent or inept—and, in some cases, both. After the initial setup, every act is either a disaster or one in waiting—and, sometimes, there's a lot of waiting for the payoff, which can often seem anticlimactic after the delay.

It's easy to admire Grant's gusto for the amoral or downright immoral absurd, as the body count rises and we're forced to either sympathize with the least treacherous players or no one at all. It's madness, for sure, but Grant's method never allows us to become caught up in the chaos.

Our protagonist is Mandy (Angela Bettis), a nurse on a sort of all-purpose wing at a hospital. She's about to work a double shift, and the only thing keeping her going is the assortment of medication she crushes and snorts when she has a moment alone.

We soon learn that Mandy is part of an organ trafficking operation run out of the hospital. She hands off the precious, valuable biological assets, gathered by an unknown partner on the previous shift. Mandy, as it's later revealed, is also the person to start the whole process. When she finds a suitable candidate, the nurse uses bleach to poison an especially hopeless—either medically or morally—case.

Tonight's possible forced donors include a man with inevitable kidney failure and a prison inmate (played by David Arquette) who attempted suicide and is scheduled for capital punishment. Also on the wing this night is Mandy's stepbrother, who suffered another drug overdose. Despite getting her hooked on drugs, Mandy wants to keep him off-limits from her supervisor Karen (Nikea Gamby-Turner), who oversees the harvesting enterprise.

For any of this work, one has to set aside any of the obvious qualms with this arrangement and the main character. Grant certainly never excuses or condones any of this activity, and indeed, the filmmaker tries to lift a lot of the moral weight from Mandy by way of some really nasty characters, whose potential or actual violence makes Mandy and her crew's actions seem like relatively nothing. In theory, that's how it appears, at least.

One of those other characters is Regina (Chloe Farnworth), Mandy's cousin-by-marriage, who is scheduled to pick up this evening's bag of organs. Regina arrives empty-handed at the organ drop. She has an hour to find the missing kidney—or a suitable substitute—before crime lord Nicholas (Mick Foley) sends his right-hand goon Mikey (Dusty Warren) to retrieve her—and one of her kidneys.

There is some demented logic to the central premise, as Mandy tries to help Regina and Regina attempts to help herself. Regina takes matters into her hands, and the resulting corpse means that the cops arrive, leading Mandy to juggle various problems—her own plan, the investigation, her now-murderer "cousin" and Regina's increasing desperation to get a kidney from anyone who even looks at her the wrong way.

The result is multiple gags, increasingly involving violence or other bloody messes (such as when Mandy removes a kidney from a dead body in the morgue, only for a blundering, naïve cop to walk in the room), and only a thin, questionable through line connecting them. Grant seems uncertain how the movie feels or how we should feel about these characters. In a way, the point here is to create some kind of vacuum of morality, in which none of this really matters. If that were truly the case, every immoral, unethical, and illegal act would just fit within that attitude. No one is innocent, so why should we care what happens to any of these characters?

That's not exactly how Grant plays this material, though. There is an attempt to find sympathy with Mandy, played by Bettis with a rough but cool attitude that's consistent enough to make the character some stabilizing force amidst the ensuing bedlam. There's also, strangely, an attempt to redeem Regina, as if her dunderheaded ways are a rationalization, not the fatal reason, for her actions.

There's an inconsistency in tone here that's almost as damaging to movie's efforts as its start-and-stop momentum. Ultimately, the herky-jerky approach of 12 Hour Shift probably hurts it more. With a greater sense of wild abandon, the movie might have convinced us to abandon our scruples with these characters and this scenario.

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